Members of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) exchange views with Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the European Commission in charge of promoting our European Way of Life on the 'lessons learnt' from the pandemic, in the European Parliament in Brussels. This transcription is the result of an automatic process. Please check against delivery.

Brussels

exchange of views

meeting

Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety

CANFIN, Pascal (Renew, FR)

SCHINAS, Margaritis (EPP-DE, EL, EC)

Coronavirus outbreak (T)

EU's response to covid-19 (T)

Drawing the early lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic in ENVI Committee: opening statements by the Chair and Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the European Commission in charge of promoting our European Way of Life

SOUNDBITE (English), Pascal CANFIN (Renew, FR), Chair of the ENVI Committee, OK, so we start again with the agenda item number eight, welcome Vice President Margaritis Schinas, on the communication, on drawing the early lessons from the covid-19 pandemic. So, as we all know, the European Commission released its communication on the 15th of June on the lessons learnt from covid-19 pandemic and the management. There is a list of key priorities to move forward. And of course, we expect you, vice president to to make the case, I would say, for these proposals. Almost all of them are in the remit of the ENVI Committee. So I think it's very appropriate that we can have an in-depth discussion on this issue. And, of course, members will probably provide additional lessons to be learnt from their perspective. As the members know, we have now, we have been engaging on a weekly contact group for a couple of months now between the Commission and the Parliament.

SOUNDBITE (English), Pascal CANFIN (Renew, FR), Chair of the ENVI Committee, And you have, as all the members of the relevant committees, INTRA, INTA and ENVI, you have the feedback of these weekly contact group and a lot of you have already participated to that. So it's the opportunity for me to thank Vice President Chinas for the setting of this contact group and the regular organisation and actually making sure that all the relevant commissioners and vice presidents take place in this and participate to these regular weekly contact group meetings. So thank you for that. So now we focus on substance, and I'm very happy to have you here for real. That's probably the first one we have, that's that kind of in-person meeting with the commissioner since actually more than fifteen months. So happy to start again this way to work together. The floor is yours for ten to fifteen minutes.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the EC in charge of promoting our European Way of Life, Thank you, dear Pascal. Dear friends, honourable members. It's nice to be on presence. There is no Parliament worthy of its name that eludes physical contact. So I'm delighted to have this opportunity to discuss our communication on the lessons learnt. This is arguably the dealing with a pandemic. It has been the centrepiece of our joint work and our lives for this year. And let's see if this will continue to be in the weeks and months ahead.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the EC in charge of promoting our European Way of Life, We do know that the pandemic is not over yet. But we also know or we are at least able to assess calmly, at this stage, what went well and what did not go so well. And that essentially the purpose of of my presentation here and of our report a few days ago. Let me first with a word of context. I would say there are two parameters when we were discussing the context of this excercise. The first, and this is the reality, is that no countries and no regions in the world were fully prepared for the breath, the intensity and the scale of the pandemic. And the European Union and our member states were no exception.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the EC in charge of promoting our European Way of Life, The second introductory, I would say, contextual remark is that health policy in Europe is still in its nascent era. This means that there was a huge symmetry between people's expectations of a Europe that would be able to deliver immediately in an area which is key to the lives, but at the same time the very weak legal basis on health policy in the treaty, which in itself conditioned many of at least are early steps in fighting the pandemic.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the EC in charge of promoting our European Way of Life, This is the right time now, moving beyond this context remarks, this is the right time to discuss what we can learn, how we might be better prepared next time, and how we can organise and structure our response effectively in the future. And that this is the core of why the commission adopted this communication on the 15th of June, which was also at the heart of the discussions of heads of state and government last week in the European Council. If we look back of what happened in the last fifteen or sixteen months, I think one has to have the courage to acknowledge all the colours around the EU way of dealing with the pandemic. And that is precisely why we structured a level of organised dialogue with Parliament around the heart of our response, which was after the vaccines. And these, as Pascal just said, took the form of a contact group in the European Parliament on vaccines.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, And this group was brought forward a lot of constructive dialogue, many suggestions from your side. And in a way, it shaped many of the aspects that you find in this communication. The communication sets out our view that we had not taken health preparedness and planning seriously enough before the pandemic. And the early stages of the pandemic had been characterised by responses of national level, which were fragmented, which were ad hoc, which were temporary and which were patchy and uncoordinated. As a result, we lost valuable time in the early stages.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the EC in charge of promoting our European Way of Life, Member states tried to move under the pressure of events by doing all the things that didn't help: export bans, fighting each other for personal protective equipment, building obstacles in trade. All sorts of things that by now we know that didn't help. But things improved later. And the resolution that this House, the European Parliament adopted in April last year, I think sums it up in a in a way that I could not improve. When you said that member states have enacted unilaterally, at the beginning, now understand that cooperation, confidence and solidarity are the only way to overcome the crisis.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the EC in charge of promoting our European Way of Life, I think this is the right choice of words. And I think that by now we should be able to give credit, where credit is the EU. Is after these clumsy first week that the European response was ample, it was generous, and it also brought on unprecedented initiatives, some would say important federalist moves that were delivered in record time. I will only mention a few of these remarkable achievements. Of course, the common EU vaccine strategy, which ensured that we have safe and affordable vaccines for every European, regardless of level of income or geography. We also managed to produce in record time the Covid certificate, which is the return to a normality. We impose the green lanes initiative that maintain the integrity of supply chains and kept our supermarkets stocked during the difficult months. And also we were instrumental in producing the Covax initiative, the EU pledging event that raised billions to support the fair distribution of vaccines and treatments across the globe.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the EC in charge of promoting our European Way of Life, In our view, the added value of working together as Europeans and coordinating our efforts was made pretty clear. And by now, only people of ill faith and bad will would challenge that. I also want to say, here in this house, that the support of the European Parliament throughout this process was essential. Essential in developing these initiatives and putting them into practise. And I am very grateful to this House and all the members for playing a key and instrumental role in our response.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the EC in charge of promoting our European Way of Life, It is not the first time that the EU has had to take unprecedented measures during the crisis. If we go back to the financial and economic crisis of 2008, 2009, you would see that this was the moment where our banking union was born. And we can now recognise that the work to strengthen our economic resilience, as a result of that crisis, paid off. Because when it comes to the economic impact of the pandemic, there again, the EU action was decisive. We had tools already in place which remain dormant most of the time, but could be triggered immediately in time of need. And we also had the political will and stamina to address our shortcomings. So overall, having heeded the lessons of the financial crisis, we could act with speed, with ambition and coherence and the same pattern of reaction, I think, it's fully transportable to our work in the health area. And this is what I come to discuss here with you.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the EC in charge of promoting our European Way of Life, If you look at our communication, we have a decalogue, ten specific lessons drawn and remedial action to accompany them and better things. But I would like to, for the sake of our discussion today, to cluster these decalogue in three broad areas, so that we can facilitate our exchange. The first area is that we have to make absolutely sure in the future that the European Union and our institutions must have the right information to know what's going on, to enable us to put the proper policy response in place. We need to know early on the data and the information necessary to act. So better surveillance and data gathering is key. This is even more relevant today because we know that the pandemic course runs in parallel to the emergence of new variants. And according to the ECDC, the Delta variant is at least 40 to 60 percent more transmissible than the Alpha one and associated with a higher risk of hospitalisation.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the EC in charge of promoting our European Way of Life, The communication that we proposed, that we adopted in June, uses modelling forecasts to estimate the spread of the variant in Europe over the summer and this careful monitoring and surveillance is precisely the area I am referring to. We need to use the available information as forsight, and I'm happy to come in more detail into the Q&amp;A session. This message remain key. Getting both doses of the vaccine available in our toolbox can protect against variants and kerb the pandemic. Our vaccine strategy is working and our efforts now should be to ensure the vaccination rollout proceeds hastily.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the EC in charge of promoting our European Way of Life, The second family of issues learnt is that we need the right instruments and structures in place at EU level to operate in peacetime, under normal circumstances, so that we can always, at all times, build a level of preparedness. And here we look forward to the establishment of our European health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority, also known as HERA, and we will make new proposals to improve the overall constellation of preparedness. An annual state of preparedness report will be established covering the EU and our member states, and this will develop as an important project of common European interest, to strengthen cutting edge research.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the EC in charge of promoting our European Way of Life, Family offices, number three. We also need tools, the right tools, to be able to deploy immediately in a crisis situation. Tools to be actively and used when needed. We think the EU needs the possibility to activate a pandemic state of emergency, building on what we already proposed in our European Health Union package last November. This new status of a EU pandemic state of emergency would act as the trigger, to provide our Union with a crisis toolbox when needed.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the EC in charge of promoting our European Way of Life, Look, for example, at how we were ready with another area that your committee deals with, the civil protection mechanism. How we managed there? That meant that we could help, for example, through repatriation more quickly than we have had to create something from scratch. As well as these points the communication also puts emphasis on a global dimension. Here, as with many other issues, we look at what needs to happen in the future. In the short term, where must continue to lead global efforts to ensure access to vaccines, but also in the longer term, where we need to step up initiatives, like the Africa initiative, to improve the world structure preparedness.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the EC in charge of promoting our European Way of Life, The international response to the pandemic has been from the very start a priority, a European priority. This is a priority that we should collectively be very proud for having delivered. We contributed, as Europeans to spearheading the global rollout of vaccines, thanks to the massive team Europe support to Covax, of over three billion euros, of which 1.3 billion euros from the EU budget. Recent summits have allowed illustrate our ambition with other examples of global solidarity. We have committed through Team Europe to donate at least 100 million doses to low and middle income countries, by the end of this year, and to help Africa with an additional one billion euro for manufacturing and access to vaccines, medicines, health technologies. And we have also joined up efforts at the G7 and decided sharing one billion doses through Covax. Overall, in this crisis, we managed to prove to the world that Europe is engaged in a solidarity of action, not in a solidarity of declaratory politics.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the EC in charge of promoting our European Way of Life, To conclude, allow me to stress again that many of the points, in our lessons learnt communication, were in a way prefigured, pre-shaped in your particularly, well draughted resolution of April of last year. This resolution, that came very early in the process, identified a number of crucial elements to address already more than a year ago, the need to reduce our dependency when it comes to strategically important products, the need for better preparedness, the need to tackle this information, a more coordinated pan-European approach to large scale clinical trials, keeping our internal borders open and keeping global supply chains flowing. All these elements you will also find in our communication. All your suggestions have indeed been incorporated in our thinking.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the EC in charge of promoting our European Way of Life, Last week, heads of state and government discussed this communication, and they invited the Slovenian presidency to take forward this work to increase our collective preparedness and response capacity. We are very happy to see that our leaders spent a lot of time discussing these lessons learnt communication. I think this is a very positive sign. Now we must start discussing concretely how to translate all these early harvest of lessons into concrete action. And this is a job that we have to do together. And of course, we must bear in mind that plans may have to adapt as an evolving epidemiological situation will certainly require us to continue reflecting and adjusting.

SOUNDBITE (English), Margaritis SCHINAS, Vice-President of the EC in charge of promoting our European Way of Life, I look now forward to hearing your views and proposals and for my part I think, by now, you should know that I have been a faithful contact point not only for this super Committee of environment, but also for your colleagues in the Committee of Industry and International Trade through our contact group, cooperation and beyond. This is the only way to work together, beyond tariffs, beyond boundaries. This is the European way, if I may say. Thank you.